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Friday, July 19, 2013

Best of the Week #110

Dear readers,

It’s the end of the week, and what a week it’s been!As you can see from Mollie’s posts (she’s
traveling non-stop, with intermittent access to the interwebs, yet she still
manages to write more frequently, and better, than I do) from Laos, she and
Andy spent the week dirt biking through the Lao countryside.The beauty is indescribable, but I can’t for
the life of me actually pronounce any of those places.Hooray Mollie and Andy!

As for me, my brother came home today!After about 24 hours of travel (he lives
really, really far away), he arrived to our local airport this morning.You know that this means?Time to make the pilgrimage to upstate NY to
spend some quality time with the family!

First, 3-D printers and NASA!Let me repeat:3-D printers!And NASA!It’s like the BBC wrote
this article just to make me happy.

NASA
has announced it has successfully tested a 3D-printed rocket engine part.

.
. .

NASA
said the component would normally have taken a year to make because of the
exact measurements involved, but by using SLM [selective laser melting] the
manufacturing time was cut to less than four months and the price reduced by
more than 70%.

Also better than a 3-d printed gun.

Any of you who’ve ever biked into the wind know that biking
into the wind is the worst!It’s like biking
up a hill, but without the satisfaction of actually biking up a hill.And biking up a hill into the wind?Forget it.I’ll walk.But riders in the Tour
de France don’t have that option. So
what do they do?They engineer
themselves and their bikes to be as aero as possible.And here’s how.

Following
14 years working in Formula One, he brought his biomechanical expertise to
cycling and founded Smart Aero Technology - a company based in Brackley, an
English town not far from Silverstone racing circuit, and one that lives and
breathes motorsport.

I think I saw these guys out on Hains Point last week. SLOW DOWN!!

If you’ve ever wondered, perhaps
on a particularly slow day at the office, how to build your own glacier, or
what one would do with their very own glacier, here
you go.Turns out glaciers can be
very useful.Who’d have thought?Probably everyone.

Chewang
Norphel, a retired civil engineer who lives in the area, thinks he has the
answer: if the natural glaciers have gone, why not build artificial ones? That
is what, for the past decade or so, he has been doing. Moreover, he has built
the new glaciers in places where they will thaw at exactly the right time, and
debouch their contents directly onto farmers’ fields.

If need another reason to get
lace up and get out, turns out exercise may alter the way certain cells behave,
specifically fat cells.

In
a paper published in the Public Library of Science, Dr Ling and her
colleagues report the effects of six months of moderate exercise on 23 male
couch-potatoes who were in their 30s and 40s. The men were supposed to attend
three workouts a week. In the event, they managed an average of 1.8.
Nevertheless, besides finding the usual effects—reduced heart rate, lowered
blood pressure and a drop in cholesterol levels—the researchers also observed
changes in the men’s adipose tissue, the place where fat is stored.
Specifically, the way fat cells in this tissue expressed their genes had
altered.

.
. .

Dr
Ling, who is interested in adult-onset diabetes (often associated with too much
body fat), knew that exercise stimulates epigenetic changes in muscle cells.
These alter how muscle processes sugar. When she and her colleagues looked for
similar alterations in their charges’ adipose tissue, they found lots—18,000
markers distributed across 7,663 genes. This matters, because adipose tissue is
not just a passive store of energy, it is also an organ in its own right,
producing a range of biologically active chemicals that have all manner of
effects on the rest of the body.

We don’t live in NYC, and there’s
no way in hell I’d wait 9 hours in this heat (or any heat, for that matter),
but this
might be one of the neatest art installments I’ve ever seen.

Since
May 12, Mr. Guo and tens of thousands of others — art lovers, technology buffs
and the merely curious — have trooped to the Museum of Modern Art for a chance
to experience “Rain Room,” a temporary installation in which water rains down
except where sensors detect people, giving visitors the illusion of walking
between the drops.

Gimmicky? Probably. Awesome? Definitely.

As many of you probably know, I
love the city of Detroit.It’s not
entirely clear why.I just do.And so it made me really, really sad to read
this morning that Detroit
filed for bankruptcy protection last night, especially because some folks
are working really hard to make Detroit cool
again.

Lieutenant-GeneralSir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de WiartVC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO (5 May 1880 - 5 June 1963), was a British Army officer of Belgian
and Irish descent. He fought in the Boer
War, World War I, and World War II, was shot in the face, head, stomach,
ankle, leg, hip and ear, survived a plane crash, tunneled out of a POW camp,
and bit off his own fingers when a doctor wouldn’t amputate them. He later said
“frankly I had enjoyed the war.”

How
long do you think it would take for you to travel to every subway station in
Manhattan? College students James Doernberg and Kai Jordan found an answer to
that question this past Wednesday, when they travelled to all 118 subway
stations in Manhattan to take selfies. “The whole trip took 9 hours almost to the minute,
and was quite a challenge, as we had to hop off the train, find a sign, take a
photo, and get back on the train before the doors closed,”Doernberg told us.

Where can I buy that hat?

It’s hot out
there.Like really hot.You know what the perfect solution to this ridiculous
heat is?Ice cream.Lots of it.So if you’re in DC this weekend, let your tongue be your guide, and go
on an ice cream tour.You’ll thank me on
Monday!And so, with the heat index
expected to hit 110 degrees today, ice
cream is, without question, your BEST OF THE WEEK!